Colophon
This website is owned and operated by David Helwig in his capacity as Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island.
Acknowledgements and thanks
Special thanks to Ann Sherman for typesetting; Allister MacDonald, Hugh MacDonald, and Laurie Brinklow for audio and video; Richard Lemm for events listings; and Simon Lloyd for the bibliography.
The title photo is by David Helwig. Incidental images in various parts of the site are sampled from personal or public-domain photos and graphics.
Unless otherwise stated, all rights to text, audio, or video versions of poems on this site are reserved by the author.
Notes
The site is designed and maintained by Ken Simons using the Textpattern content management system.
The Textpattern editor uses plain text — formatted with the minimalist Textile markup language — rather than highly styled HTML. More detailed technical notes on the Textpattern install are found here.
All pages on our site use a print stylesheet to save on paper when a user prints from their browser.
This site has been tested on Firefox 2.x, Mozilla 1.3x, Explorer 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x, Konquerer 3.x, Safari, and Opera 5.x and 9.x.
Here are some common issues and their solutions:
- Poems are designed to be read best with Georgia, a wide-spaced TrueType font found on most installations of Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Nearly all the poems on our site should also display well if another serif or sans-serif typeface is substituted.
- We use style rules to create the effect of indents. These are calculated in ems (a variable measure which depends on the font being used). This gives a good result on visual browsers which support stylesheets, but indents will not appear at all on very old or text-only browsers. We hope to install an aural stylesheet which will give an indication of line indents.
- If you have Flash installed on your browser, there is an embedded music player which can play the sound clips in the “Podcasts” sesction. If the player is not visible, there is an alternative download link which will allow you to play or download the clip to an external program or location. IE7/Windows users may need to click the ‘play’ icon twice to play an audio file.
- There is also an embedded Flash player for video — without, however, an alternative download link.
- A minor bug affects the “random poem” feature for some users of Firefox, in that only one random poem will appear per session. A new poem will, however, appear when you exit the site and then re-enter it.
Accessibility
For partially sighted users who use screen reader software, alternate navigation links are given at the beginning of each article. These links are also useful for text-only browsers such as Lynx.
Relative font sizes are used to assist those who use larger font sizes by default. We have attempted to make the site easily navigable for users with motor disabilities, but welcome your comments if any problems are encountered.